PHONETIC DISINTEGRATION IN A 5-YEAR-OLD FOLLOWING SUDDEN HEARING-LOSS

The speech of a 5 yr old boy who suffered a profound hearing loss following meningitis was sampled at 2-wk intervals for 9 mo. Speech samples were subjected to phonetic transcription, spectrographic analysis, and intelligibility testing. Immediately post-trauma, the child displayed slightly slower, F0 elevated, acoustically intense speech in which phonemeic distortion and syllabification of consonants occurred occasionally; single word intelligiblity was depressed below normal between 20-30%. By the 18th wk, a sudden decline in intelligibility, increasing monotony of pitch, and a pattern of strongly emphatic, prolonged, aspirated, syllabified, and increasingly distorted consonants were manifest. At year''s end, the child''s speech bore some resemblance to the speech of the deaf in terms of suprasegmentals, intonation and intelligibility, but differed because the child rarely, if ever deleted speech sounds or diphthongized vowels stronlgy. It is speculated that phonetic processes such as diphthongization, syllabification, and prolonged duration may be strategies for enhancing feedback during speech.